Recently, interactive media over computer networks has become popular. For example, as the number of people using the Internet has exploded, content providers have come to appreciate media and services offered over the Internet as a potentially powerful way to access end users.
Interactive media provides opportunities for content providers to target their content to a receptive audience. That is, targeted contents are more likely to be useful to end users since the content may be relevant to a need inferred from some user activity (e.g., relevant to a user's search query to a search engine, relevant to content in a document requested by the user, etc.). Query keyword targeting has been used by search engines to deliver relevant content.
End users are spending an ever-increasing amount of time online, looking for information and/or content. The information, provided by Internet content providers, is viewed on a page-by-page basis. Each page can contain written and graphical information as well as one or more links, advertisements, and/or the like. Key advantages of the Internet, relative to other information media, are that each page can be customized to fit a customer profile and may contain links to other Internet pages. Thus, content can be directly targeted at different customer segments. For example, content targeting is nowadays possible based on the geographic location of the provider and/or the customer, the past navigation path of the customer outside or within the web site, the language used by the visitor's web browser, the purchase history on a website, the behavioral intent influenced by the user's action on the site, and more.
The content providers can record end user accesses to the content, clicking of links in the content, and/or the like to further report on the targeting efficiency. In this context, software robots, viruses, internet crawlers, and/or the like can mimic the end user's actions both in selecting content and in further clicking on links within the content.
The foregoing examples of the related art and limitations related therewith are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the related art will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon a reading of the specification and a study of the figures.